System-on-Chip (SoC) design often requires the design and management of hundreds or thousands of registers, including register specification and description, generation of control register logic, verification, system tests, etc. In may circumstances, specifying and managing configuration registers constitutes a substantial portion of chip design with respect to time, cost and resource allocation. The term “register” as used herein, encompasses various terminology used in the art including, but not limited to, configuration and status registers (CSR), control registers, design control registers, configuration registers, etc.
In conventional chip design, the various tasks associated with the design and management of registers is handled manually. For example, typical chip design involves a number of stages including: 1) a specification stage in which registers may be described in a document style specification based on, for example, various design requirements and input from marketing; 2) a design stage in which the register specification may be implemented, for example, using any of various hardware description languages (HDL) such as Verilog, VHDL, etc.; 3) a verification stage to test the created register design; and 4) a silicon stage in which a fabricated chip is system tested using hardware input vectors.
FIG. 1 illustrates a flowchart of conventional SoC design. Typically, the design process begins by writing a specification for the chip design (e.g., register specification 120). Register specification 120 may be generated by the system architect in connection with input from marketing and in view of various design requirements and concerns. For example, the register specification may be generated based in part to satisfy marketing requirements 110a and design requirements 110b. The system architect or design team typically generates the register specification in a selected presentation format such as a word processor format (e.g., Microsoft® Word®), other presentation format such Microsoft® PowerPoint®, spreadsheet, or a web-publishing format such as hypertext mark-up language (HTML), which may be easily converted into a portable document format (PDF) file that can be shared amongst the design team and/or customers, posted on the Internet, etc.
The completed register specification may then be distributed to various engineering teams for implementation. For example, hardware design engineers 130a may generate HDL descriptions of the register maps from the register specification document. Hardware verification engineers 130b may design verification tasks based on the register specification and the HDL descriptions created by the design engineers. Similarly, software engineers 130c may generate code based on the register specification document. After the various engineering teams have completed their design tasks, the design is verified and tested to expose hardware and/or software bugs or other errors in the design. For example, the completed design may undergo hardware verification/testing 140a and software verification/testing 140b. 
Errors discovered during verification/testing are reported back to the architecture team and the register specification is modified accordingly. For example, hardware bugs 145a and software bugs 145b are reported so that register specification 120 may be updated to appropriately reflect the bug fixes. The modified specification may then be distributed again to the engineering design teams and the process is repeated until the design is complete and substantially error free. In addition, new input from marketing or additional design requirements may be received at any point during the design phase, requiring update to the register specification documents and further design by the engineering teams to implement the updated register specification.
In such conventional design flows, the different stages of development may be largely unsynchronized and often performed manually and independently of the other stages. For example, different individuals or different teams may be assigned responsibility for each of the different stages. Errors exposed at one of the stages may then require extensive work in each of the other stages, which in turn requires one or more different teams to correct the portions of the design for which they are responsible. As such, engineers spend relatively significant time and resources making changes, fixing bugs and ensuring that all changes made by other groups or personnel are implemented. In addition, conventional design flows are vulnerable to circumstances where versions of the register design are out of sync. For example, bug fixes made by a hardware engineer and/or software engineer may not immediately be incorporated into the specification document. Similarly, changes made to the specification document made not immediately be incorporated into the code base of the engineers. Accordingly, much time and resources may be necessary to ensure that the various design groups are in sync, and working from the same version of the register specification.